5 January 1993 – Westley Allan Dodd

‘I must be executed before I have an opportunity to escape or kill someone else’ said US sex offender and serial killer Westley Allan Dodd.

Also known as Satan’s disciple, Dodd was branded ‘incurable’ by his own admission. The murderous sex offender from Richland, Washington was convicted of killing 3 boys. He stabbed 11-year-old Cole Neer, and his brother William, 10 in a park on 4 September 1989 in cold blood as one of them imploringly cried out ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’. He stabbed the boys multiple times and one even tried to escape during the frenzied attack.

He then went on to target 4-year-old Lee Joseph Iseli. Following a two-day marathon of rape and torture, Iseli was hanged and his little body was finally dredged from Lake Vancouver.

Dodd’s motive? ‘I was getting bored. I didn’t have a TV’ said the callous killer. But the law finally caught up with him after he botched an attempt to abduct another unnamed boy.

Younger days

The eldest of three brothers, Dodd grew up in a loveless household. His younger brother Gregory even referred to him a nerd and said that when Dodd was growing up other school children would make fun of him. Gregory Dodd even went on the hypothesise that his serial killing spree was a form of revenge for his childhood persecution. Throughout high school and beyond Dodd went on to sexually abuse a wealth of children, some say as many as 50. But he managed to evade lengthy punishments his crimes.

Futile

Washington State instead tried to rehabilitate him and failed. Dodd said of the attempts to cure him that ‘I have said all along the system does not work. I knew what I was doing, I knew it was wrong. I knew I could get the death penalty if caught. I killed them.’

And finally the law caught up with him and he was sentenced to death for the murders. The 31-year-old chose hanging over lethal injection as the method of execution, saying of his victims,’they didn’t get an nice, neat, painless, easy death. Why should I?’. So, on 5 January 1993, his became the first legal hanging in America since 1965.